President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has for the first time topped the list of candidates Ukrainians say they would not vote for under any circumstances, according to the pollster SOCIS.

The finding was attributed to Ihor Hryniv, who is associated with SOCIS, and was reported by the Ukrainian news site Censor.NET. Leading an anti-rating is a different measurement from a low approval score: it counts the voters a candidate can never win, which in a two-round system is the number that decides the second round.

Zelenskiy's headline numbers have not collapsed. SOCIS itself had him finishing first in a hypothetical first round this month on 22%, ahead of former commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhny on 21% and digital transformation minister Mykhailo Fedorov on 13%. The same poll put him behind Fedorov, Zaluzhny and intelligence chief Kyrylo Budanov in every projected runoff - which is what an anti-rating in first place does to a candidate.

Nobody is voting yet. Martial law bars elections while it remains in force, and the practical question is not who would win but how much political authority the president can spend - on mobilisation, on an unpopular settlement, on a budget that needs tax rises - when polling says a majority has already ruled him out.

Pressure to hold a vote has been building through the summer, and Zelenskiy's trust rating fell earlier this year after the attempt to curb Ukraine's anti-corruption agencies, the point at which corruption overtook Russia as the threat Ukrainians named most often.

The provenance of this particular number needs stating. Hryniv was Petro Poroshenko's chief ideologist, and SOCIS's association with him gives the firm an interest in the finding. That does not make the number wrong - it tracks a trend other pollsters have also recorded - but it is not a neutral source on this particular president.